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Sunday, 26 March 2017

Modi-Trump alliance is must for stability in Indo-Pacific region (Organiser)

By M D Nalapat

For more than two generations, forecasts have universally predicted that
China, the US and India will soon be the top three economies on the
globe. Despite its demographic decline, the Russian Federation will most
likely be able to leverage its territorial resources sufficiently to
emerge as the fourth power, with Brazil eventually elbowing out Japan
for the subsequent fifth slot as a consequence of its developing and
largely unutilised potential. As for Russia, despite the romantic
(indeed, fanatic) visions of essentially racist elements in St
Petersburg and Moscow who continue to regard those of European descent
as being superior in qualities to others, including those from Asia, the
Russian Federation is a Eurasian country that is neither European nor
Asian but a fusion of both. The US, meanwhile, is a quadricontinental
power that has elements from each continent (Europe, Asia, South
America, Africa) merged within its cultural DNA.Only Brazil is
wholly outside Asia among the emerging global Big Six, while the
European Union is visibly dissolving as a consequence of a growing lack
of congruence and compatibility between the national goals of its major
components. Greece, Bulgaria and Italy, for example, do not share the
visceral fear of Russia of Poland, France and Germany.The present
trans-Atlantic effort to retain Moscow as Enemy Number One is based not
on realities but on the increasingly more expensive hence desperate
struggle by Paris and Berlin to retain the present primacy of the
Atlantic Alliance over the emerging Indo-Pacific alliance backstopped by
the US and India by far, the world’s two most conseqeuntial
democracies. President Trump’s “crime” is that, as a business person, he
has embraced the reality of the Indo-Pacific century rather than
clinging on to a moribund Atlanticist strategy the way the bureaucracies
in Washington, London, Paris and Berlin wish him to do. Despite efforts
from the more conventional minds in his entourage to make the 45th
President of the United States return to the post-1945 Atlanticist
strategy that is still the gospel of the East Coast establishment,
President Trump can be expected to battle his way towards fashioning a
set of policies for the US that reflect 21st century realities rather
than 19th century verities carried forward with some modifications into
the next century. Hence, it is inevitable that President Trump would
understand the centrality of India in any future geopolitical strategy
of Washington, and therefore the importance of arriving at a
comprehensive understanding with Prime Minister Modi on how the two
countries can concert in order to meet the threats as well as take
advantage of the opportunities presented by the 21st century.Both
will need to go beyond their bureaucracies if they are to succeed in a
US-India strategic rapprochement that matches in importance the 1970s
coming together of Beijing and Washington as a consequence of the
understanding reached between President Nixon and Chairman Mao at their
1972 meeting. George W Bush, Manmohan Singh and Barack Obama understood
the centrality of a US-India partnership in the evolving architecture of
the present century, but failed to actualise it as a consequence of
legalistic pettifogging and procedural foot-dragging by both
establishments. In the case of India, there are those who believe that a
country that remains a $ 2 trillion economy after seven decades of
freedom as a consequence of policy failures and errors has the muscle
needed to ensure that its strategic objectives are met by itself. They
have therefore prevented,for example in 2003 by refusing a US request to
send 18,000 troops to safeguard the Kurdish zone in Iraq, a request
that (if complied with) would have made Delhi a significant player in a
region vital to its economic and security interests. Of course,
Washington too has to share the blame for the present severe
under-utilisation of potential India-US synergy. During 1993-94, Prime
Minister Narasimha Rao sought an alliance with the US but was turned
away by President Bill Clinton, who remained tethered to the (then)
Pakistan-centric US military and intelligence services.That led to
the growth of jehadi groups worldwide, including the units that attacked
the US in 9/11. This same Atlanticist-Orientalist establishment in
Washington made President Bush in 2001 reject Prime Minister Atal Behari
Vajpayee’s offer of fullscope assistance to clean out South Asia of
terrorist elements. Instead of India, the Bush administration opted in
favour of another embrace by the Pentagon and the CIA of GHQ Rawalpindi,
a policy which directly led to the growth of ultra-Wahabbi terror and
violence subsequently. Both Bill Clinton and George W Bush have much to
answer for at a time when cities across Europe are experiencing terror
strikes, even as both (one openly and the other secretly) are trying to
create trouble for President Trump so that the failed policies of the
past may get continued into the future rather than get replaced with an
Indo-Pacific centred strategy in place of an Atlanticist-Orientalist
construct that has, for example, led to the present chaos in Libya, Iraq
and Syria.Thus far, weapon dealers based in Dubai and London who
are worried about the prospect of greater competition for their wares
from US manufacturers have succeeded in ensuring that Logistics
Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA) has yet to be operationalised,
while BECA and CISMOA (the other two Defense Foundation Agreements with
the US) have not even been signed. It is nonsense to say that such a
signing would compromise sovereignity, but this is the argument being
used, of course to joy in Islamabad and in Beijing, which are unhappy
at the prospect of a closer military-to-military alliance between
Washington and Delhi. As for Moscow, hopefully President Trump will be
able to shake off those who seek to keep going the fiction that Russia
is the primary challenger to US primacy in an age when within years,
China will be the world’s biggest economy. A Delhi-Moscow-Washington
understanding against ultra-Wahabbi terror would be a formidable force
multiplier in the global campaign to free the world of this virus, and
Prime Minister Modi can be expected to support President Trump's bid to
work closely with Moscow against threats common to both sides. In the
war now being waged by the ultra-Wahabbis through offshoots such as
ISIS, India is a principal target, together with the US and Israel. The
security establishment in India needs to migrate from a Pakistan-centred
approach into working out lines of action reflecting the need to deal
with threats that are emerging in regions far from Pakistan,such as
within West Asia. In such a context, a coming together of Washington and
Delhi would enable both sides to pool information and jointly work out
tactics designed to degrade and destroy terror forces.A focus area
for both the US and India has to be the Indian Ocean Rim (or the Indian
Ocean Zone). As the primary power in the zone, India needs to establish
its primacy in the IOR, and this is possible only in partnership with
the US. In such a context,the decision of Delhi to refuse to allow
Canberra to participate in the Malabar Naval Exercise was wrong.
Hopefully, this mistake will get rectified soon in the form of other
joint exercises involving Australia, India, the US, Japan and perhaps
later Singapore, the Philippines and Vietnam. Our bureaucracy seems
still wedded to the Nehruvian tradition of “not missing an opportunity
to miss an opportunity”, and this tendency will need the determination
and wisdom of Prime Minister Modi to overcome. Among the measures which
could get discussed between Trump and Modi are the basing of a
super-powerful array of US-India sensors in the southernmost part of
India that would ensure real time information on movements and
activities on and in the Indian Ocean. A similar array is functioning in
Jindalee, Australia, and is proving useful to Canberra and its allies
in keeping track of potential threats.Along with defence
cooperation, there needs to be a collaboration in technology. Indian
technology companies need to be allowed to give value to US entities
rather than being blocked. Overall, the 21st century partnership that
should to get worked out between Prime Minister Modi and President Trump
needs to “walk on two legs” : economics and security. Both deserve
attention and both should be strong. The world will watch as the leaders
of two giant democracies meet in the White House on June 26. What they
need is to allow their ambitions to race far ahead of the caution and
traditionalism of their bureaucracies, so that the Modi-Trump meeting of
June 2017 emerges as momentous in history as the Nixon-Mao meeting of
February 1972. The Indo-Pacific Century mandates a breakthrough on the
same scale in India-US relations as having taken place in the past
between the US and China.

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About Prof. M. D. Nalapat

Prof. Madhav Das Nalapat (aka MD Nalapat or Monu Nalapat), holds the UNESCO Peace Chair and is Director of the Department of Geopolitics at Manipal Academy of Higher Education, India. The former Coordinating Editor of the Times of India, he writes extensively on security, policy and international affairs. Prof. Nalapat has no formal role in government, although he is said to influence policy at the highest levels. @MD_Nalapat

MD Nalapat's anthology 'Indutva' (1999)

In 1999, Har-Anand published Indutva an anthology of MD Nalapat's 1990s columns from the Times of India. The individual columns are posted here, in 1998 and 1999 of the blog archive, though the exact dates of publication are uncertain.